Genesius Redux
06-23-2004, 10:59 PM
I was in Centennial Park this evening, just to collect my thoughts and enjoy a cigar. And on the green expanse of lawn in front of the Parthenon I saw a young couple. The boy was lying in the grass, and the girl was twirling around him in this spontaneous way. It was clear she wasn't a dancer, but it was also clear how lost she was in the joy of the movement.
As she came back to the boy, they played a little, wrestling and flirting, until she joined him laughing on the ground, where they continued to touch and respond and explore. All in broad daylight, in the public eye. Even from a hundred yards away, I could see that their play had very little to do with language or thought or ideas. It was the animal and childlike play of touch and respond, and amazingly attractive--to think of the possibility of such a relationship, outside of language, or politics, or religion, or belief systems, or thoughts. The simple play of desire, need, and basic human responsiveness that many of us long for, a relationship of motion and feeling, outside words.
And it struck me that this is what dance is, at its most elemental. Though we are surrounded by music, lyrics, shouts of encouragement, a bustling world that watches us, reflects on us, categorizes us, we dance in silence, our connections established through an earlier language of touch and response, which we call lead and follow. And it is this, for me, the silence of dance and its removal from the rational and the analytical, that makes for its appeal.
There is a relevant passage in St. Augustine's Confessions that I believe suggests the deeply spiritual roots of this yearning for silence.
If for any man the tumult of the flesh fell silent, silent the images of earth, and of the waters, and of the air; silent the heavens; silent for him the very soul itself, and he should pass beyond himself by not thinking upon himself; silent his dreams and all imagined appearances, and every tongue, and every sign; and if all things that come to be through change should become wholly silent to him--for if any man can hear, then all these things say to him, "We did not make ourselves," but he who endures forever made us--if when they have said these words, they then become silent, for they have raised up his ear to him who made them, and God alone speaks, not through such things but through himself, so we hear his Word, not uttered by a tongue of flesh, nor by an angel's voice, "nor by the sound of thunder," nor by the riddle of a similitude, but by himself whom we love in these things, himself we hear without their aid,--even as we then reached out and in swift thought attained to that eternal Wisdom which abides over all things--if this could be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind could be withdrawn; and this one alone ravish, and absorb, and hide away its beholder within its deepest joys, so that sempiternal life might be such as was that moment of understanding for which we sighed, would it not be this: "Enter into the joy of your Lord?"
To dance, in silence, is to make love to the divine.
Goodnight.
As she came back to the boy, they played a little, wrestling and flirting, until she joined him laughing on the ground, where they continued to touch and respond and explore. All in broad daylight, in the public eye. Even from a hundred yards away, I could see that their play had very little to do with language or thought or ideas. It was the animal and childlike play of touch and respond, and amazingly attractive--to think of the possibility of such a relationship, outside of language, or politics, or religion, or belief systems, or thoughts. The simple play of desire, need, and basic human responsiveness that many of us long for, a relationship of motion and feeling, outside words.
And it struck me that this is what dance is, at its most elemental. Though we are surrounded by music, lyrics, shouts of encouragement, a bustling world that watches us, reflects on us, categorizes us, we dance in silence, our connections established through an earlier language of touch and response, which we call lead and follow. And it is this, for me, the silence of dance and its removal from the rational and the analytical, that makes for its appeal.
There is a relevant passage in St. Augustine's Confessions that I believe suggests the deeply spiritual roots of this yearning for silence.
If for any man the tumult of the flesh fell silent, silent the images of earth, and of the waters, and of the air; silent the heavens; silent for him the very soul itself, and he should pass beyond himself by not thinking upon himself; silent his dreams and all imagined appearances, and every tongue, and every sign; and if all things that come to be through change should become wholly silent to him--for if any man can hear, then all these things say to him, "We did not make ourselves," but he who endures forever made us--if when they have said these words, they then become silent, for they have raised up his ear to him who made them, and God alone speaks, not through such things but through himself, so we hear his Word, not uttered by a tongue of flesh, nor by an angel's voice, "nor by the sound of thunder," nor by the riddle of a similitude, but by himself whom we love in these things, himself we hear without their aid,--even as we then reached out and in swift thought attained to that eternal Wisdom which abides over all things--if this could be prolonged, and other visions of a far inferior kind could be withdrawn; and this one alone ravish, and absorb, and hide away its beholder within its deepest joys, so that sempiternal life might be such as was that moment of understanding for which we sighed, would it not be this: "Enter into the joy of your Lord?"
To dance, in silence, is to make love to the divine.
Goodnight.